From a recent issue of the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik surveys a recent selection of books about who Jesus was.

The American scholar Bart Ehrman has been explaining the scholars’ truths for more than a decade now, in a series of sincere, quiet, and successful books. Ehrman is one of those best-selling authors like Richard Dawkins and Robert Ludlum and Peter Mayle, who write the same book over and over — but the basic template is so good that the new version is always worth reading. In his latest installment, ‘Jesus, Interrupted’, Ehrman once again shares with his readers the not entirely good news he found a quarter century ago when, after a fundamentalist youth, he went to graduate school: that all the Gospels were written decades after Jesus’ death; that all were written in Greek, which Jesus and the apostles didn’t speak and couldn’t write (if they could read and write at all); and that they were written as testaments of faith, not chronicles of biography, shaped to fit a prophecy rather than report a profile.

Shame about those, you know, facts.

Another debate, this one entitled Jesus: Messiah, Myth, or Legend?, was held at Macquarie University on March 16, 2010. The event was co-sponsored by the Christian group I’m part of, Macquarie University Christian Union, and the Macquarie University Atheist League.

The speakers were Dan Barker and Chris Forbes.
Dan Barker is co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation (USA), was a former teenage evangelical preacher and an ordained minister, but is now one of America’s leading atheists. Dr Chris Forbes is a Senior Lecturer in Ancient History, and Deputy Chairman of the Society for the Study of Early Christianity. His areas of interest include New Testament history, and the intersection of early Christianity and Graeco-Roman culture.

It was a really good debate, and very well attended by all sorts of people. Further, it didn’t suffer from the format in the same way as the previous debate. It was, however, incredibly one-sided. In my opinion, Barker was thrashed. This is one of the best defences of Jesus as a historical figure I’ve heard.

Have a listen, and see how what you think.

(Note: the debate goes for well over an hour, so the file is relatively large: ~70 MB.)

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
“Forward, the Light Brigade!
“Charge for the guns!” he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

Alfred Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade is chilling reading. Depicting a charge of men on horseback bearing sabres into a valley filled with their enemy armed to the teeth with firepower, it shows an act of great foolishness during the Crimean War.

“Forward, the Light Brigade!”
Was there a man dismay’d?
Not tho’ the soldier knew
Someone had blunder’d:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley’d and thunder’d;
Storm’d at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.

Reading it in an Australian context, it sounds a lot like Gallipoli. During World War I, about one tenth of the total population enlisted in the armed forces. 15% of those men died, another 35% were gassed, injured, or captured. The charge of the ANZACS at Gallipoli is an event still imprinted on the Australian consciousness almost a century later.

Flash’d all their sabres bare,
Flash’d as they turn’d in air,
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army, while
All the world wonder’d:
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right thro’ the line they broke;
Cossack and Russian
Reel’d from the sabre stroke
Shatter’d and sunder’d.
Then they rode back, but not
Not the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
Volley’d and thunder’d;
Storm’d at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell,
They that had fought so well
Came thro’ the jaws of Death
Back from the mouth of Hell,
All that was left of them,
Left of six hundred.

These soldiers, and many other men and women are remembered for their service. Anzac Day each year is an occasion of particular remembrance.

When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wondered.
Honor the charge they made,
Honor the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred.

The ANZACS died for others. (And, indeed, countless others in theatres of war throughout history.) They died for those they did not know. For a great number who they could never have met. Their deaths were in place of those they left behind.

So what makes the single death of the one man Jesus so special?

You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

[Romans 5:6–8]

Unlike the ANZACS, Christ died for his enemies. Not for his friends, family, countrymen, but his enemies. But I must confess that I still, at times, struggle to see this as unique. As so completely particular to Jesus as to render every other death pale in comparison.

I think it’s because I don’t adequately feel the horror of sin.

I don’t properly see my former sinful self as so wholly separate from the holy, right, pure, good God. I was an enemy. An enemy so opposed to God that the bitterness between two men at war is no comparison.

Sin is ugly, twisted, horrific. But it comes so easily, so naturally, that I don’t feel its power. I don’t see the horror.

Even still, at just the right time, Christ died for me.

Why, every one knows that in practice we very often find tenses interchanged when time is spoken of; and especially is this the custom of Holy Scripture, not only in respect of the past tense, and of the present; but even of the future, as for instance “Why did the heathen rage?” when they had not yet raged and “they shall cross over the river on foot”, where the meaning is they did cross over. It would be a long task to reckon up all the expressions of this kind which students have noticed.

[Third Theological Oration (Oration XXIX.V)]

This was a guy who spoke Greek, talking about students who spoke Greek, who noticed Greek tense forms do funny things.

And here am I doing a research project on Greek tense forms, and why they do what they do (in particular cases).

Wish me luck, internet.

Something that struck me a few times was how common it is that people pick up a Bible, stone cold (for various reasons: whether in a hotel room, or an old one off the shelf, or prompted to do so by some momentous life event), and they start reading from the beginning.

Which makes sense. That’s where most books start. So too with the Bible.

Sort of.

I mean, that’s where it starts, but the stuff that I would want to point people to if they’re new to the whole reading-the-Bible thing would be the start of the New Testament – the gospels, the biographies of Jesus.

Because the ‘Christ’ bit of ‘Christianity’ is about Jesus Christ. He’s the one around whom the whole deal is centered.

Lots of people, however, when they start reading the Bible from the start, give up pretty quickly, as it seems to get irrelevant fast. If they’ve made it to Leviticus, they’re pretty committed, but they’re gone at the chapter after chapter of sacrifice offerings in ancient Israel. One can hardly blame them. I mean, if you’ve got no frame of reference, no Jesus who fulfils all this… then why is this stuff so significant?

So it got me thinking.

Why not print Bibles in a different order?

Rearrange the books inside.

Put the gospels up first. Get people reading about Jesus straight-up. That’s what we do with people if we start reading the Bible with them, so why not prompt others to do likewise?

We could do other things too, such as putting Luke and Acts together. Acts is the sequel, by the same author – why not have them together?

How about this:

• Mark
• Luke-Acts
• Matthew
• John
• Romans
• Pentateuch (Genesis-Deuteronomy)
• Hebrews
• New Testament Letters
• Prophets
• Writings
• Revelation

Something like this could present Jesus to the reader first-up, from a few different perspectives. Romans has been regarded by lots of people as laying out the fundamentals of Christian belief, so put that next.

The core of Israelite belief is fundamentally important to understanding what goes on the New Testament, so we go back and read the Law (Torah/Pentateuch), and reflect on it specifically through the letter to the Hebrews.

What do you think?

Principally, the distinction between testaments, or covenants, may be made unclear. This is especially the case if the books from the OT and NT are interspersed.

We also stand to lose a certain historical heritage. Tradition has been that certain books stand in certain positions, often for good reasons. ^[1] Most of us, however, don’t really know what those reasons are.

But do we stand to gain more than we lose?

(That’s the 10th of December, for those of you who want to note it down.)

Luminaries include:

• Augusto Pinochet (2006; military dictator of Chile)
• Eugene J. McCarthy (2005; US Senator)
• Otis Redding (1967; singer)
• Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1938; founder of Republic of Turkey)
• Alfred Nobel (1896; inventor of dynamite and founder of nobel prize)

and my personal favourite:

• Karl Barth (1968; Swiss theologian)

[NB: 'Spotlight' here refers to a segment we run at church, and has nothing to do with a certain Apple search technology.]

Last year’s Easter Furphy was all about the Talpiot Tomb.

Discovered in 1980, not far from Jerusalem, this tomb contained a number of ossuaries (coffins, basically).

Some of them had writing on them, and some looked like they might be Jesus’ family. Mariamene was the inscription on one ossuary, which some speculated could be a rendering of Mary Magdalene. One disputed epigraph arguably reads “Jesus, son of Joseph”.

All of this was old news this time last year, except for the fact that James Cameron (of Titanic fame) and Simcha Jacobovici made a documentary titled The Lost Tomb of Jesus, and released it shortly before Easter. In media reports at the conclusion of a conference of archaeological and epigraphical experts, views put forward in this documentary seemed to have precedence over those of scholars.

Why is all of this important? The historicity of Jesus’ death and resurrection is critical for Christianity:

“And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.”

- Paul, 1 Corinthians 15:14

In a letter signed by some 17 experts from the conference, certain claims made in the media concerning this tomb are refuted:

“… we wish to protest the misrepresentation of the conference proceedings in the media, and make it clear that the majority of scholars in attendance – including all of the archaeologists and epigraphers who presented papers relating to the tomb – either reject the identification of the Talpiot tomb as belonging to Jesus’ family or find this claim highly speculative.”

So why bring this old news up again, after basically all of the ‘facts’ have been repudiated? Because it happens each Easter and Christmas, that a story comes out throwing doubt on Christianity in some way. It’s not surprising – stories like this, in order to be newsworthy, have to have an edge. It’s not interesting if someone says that they believe in and agree with historic Christian belief. It’s newsworthy if someone finds an expert, or a bishop, who is willing to say that they have grave reservations about something or other.

John Dickson’s The Christ Files (screening Good Friday, 12pm, channel 7) may take the spot of that story this Easter, but I’ll not be surprised if I see another story like the Talpiot tomb this week.

“Focus solely on current events and it’s all too easy to despair at the state of the world. But science and progress march ever forward, and the world is a better place today than it used to be.”

Progress Technology will save us all, right?

I came across this little historical tidbit in the process of writing an essay earlier in the year, but it came up again in my study for a Reformation Church History exam next week. It’s taken from The Later Reformation in England 1547-1603, by Diarmaid MacCulloch (1968), in the context of continental theological divisions that existed between Lutherans and Calvinists in England:

“Amid these divisions, there were distinctive English theological priorities, but the English added little that was original; indeed, the English lack of capacity for abstract theological invention is so marked through national history as to constitute a dangerously plausible argument for persistent national characteristics.“